You might think that the urge to escape to the country really only got going with the Industrial Revolution, but really we should be looking back at least 2,000 years. The Roman poet Horace was already lamenting the loss of traditional country ways and the drift to the towns in the first century BC, contrasting the degraded life of naughty townies with the purity and authenticity of life on a farm (which would come as a surprise to anyone who’s watched Josh O’Connor shagging his way through God’s Own Country). Yet the appeal of the pastoral life persists, powered by a nostalgia that dates back, in the Christian canon at least, to the Garden of Eden, and a handsome book by Clare Foster and Andrew Montgomery features a few contemporary Edens of its own.
Pastoral Gardens, published by the photographer’s own new imprint, Montgomery Press, includes 20 gardens created by some of the leading designers of our time, plus essays by Jinny Blom, Nigel Dunnett, Kim Wilkie and Tom Stuart-Smith. Montgomery’s photographs are sumptuous, and he’s at least as good at capturing people as he is at picturing plants, while Foster’s text is informative, thoughtful and up-to-the-minute, as you’d expect from the in-house expert at House & Garden.
Yet what is a pastoral garden? Is it simply a garden in the country – a country or cottage garden? If that’s the case, Jasper Conran’s bucolic west Dorset hillside certainly counts, as does Luciano Giubbilei’s Deep Rock Farm in rural Virginia, USA, which comes complete with a herd of 50 Piedmont cattle. But how about Emily Erlam’s very urbane urban garden in King’s Cross, London, or Nigel Dunnett’s influential planting in the Barbican? They’re naturalistic, admittedly, but hardly pastoral, with a distinct lack of livestock or borrowed views of surrounding countryside, since there isn’t any within 15 miles to borrow.
Perhaps this doesn’t matter, though, since pastoral gardens have always been as much an idea or an ideal as a reality. In Britain, we generally think of the style being invented in the late 1730s by the all-round design genius William Kent, who took Charles Bridgeman’s formal garden at Rousham in Oxfordshire and loosened its stays. By softening its hard edges, opening up vistas into the surrounding landscape and introducing elements of surprise – all done without any of the floral fripperies of a conventional garden – Kent created a brilliantly poetic space that still works its quiet magic today, almost 300 years on. As Horace Walpole wrote in 1771, Kent ‘leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden’.
One can’t imagine Marie Antoinette leaping many fences, but her own ill-fated vision of a pastoral garden, later in the 18th century, was equally influential in its own way. Created in a corner of the vast park surrounding the palace of Versailles, the Hameau de la Reine included a working farm, complete with dairy, water mill, dovecot and a half-timbered barn. Here the queen could escape from the constrictions of court life and Le Nôtre’s endless formal gardens, and though she never actually played at being a shepherdess, her absurdly prettified vision of pastoral life stood in such stark contrast to the filth and grinding poverty of real French farms that the hameau only added to her downfall in the French Revolution a few years later, when the outraged peasantry stormed Versailles and burned down her barn.
Marie Antoinette aside, pastoral gardens evidently retain a strong appeal today, though now with a vogueish dose of rewilding. Yet as Saltburn reminded us, even the most idyllic pastoral landscape has its dark side, and every Eden has a serpent lurking somewhere in the long grass.
‘Pastoral Gardens’ was published on 5 Nov 2024 by Montgomery Press. Visit montgomerypress.co.uk
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